Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol

Every holiday season, the Morgan displays Charles Dickens’s original manuscript of A Christmas Carol in J. Pierpont Morgan's Library. Dickens wrote his iconic tale in a six-week flurry of activity beginning in October 1843 and ending in time for Christmas publication. He had the manuscript bound in red goatskin leather as a gift for his solicitor, Thomas Mitton. The manuscript then passed through several owners before Pierpont Morgan acquired it in the 1890s.

Beginning a few years ago, the Morgan started advancing the Christmas Carol manuscript by one page each season. This year’s passage finds Scrooge alone, having sent away the charity canvassers and reluctantly giving Bob Cratchit Christmas day off. While Bob dashes off for parlor games at home in Camden Town, Scrooge leaves the office “with a growl” and “took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern.” To characterize Scrooge’s own residence, described as “a gloomy suite of rooms in a lowering pile of building up a yard where it had so little business to be,” Dickens uses a surprising metaphor of play: “one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there, when it was a young house, playing at hide and seek with other houses; and have forgotten the way out again.” The darkness and fog enveloping Scrooge’s home instill a foreboding mood in the scene, as does the narrator’s assurance to the reader that “there was nothing at all particular about the knocker on the door.” Marley’s arrival is imminent.

Explore Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol online and view other related highlights from the collection.

Share in the festivities with your own copy of A Christmas Carol available from the Morgan Shop. This is the first-ever trade edition of Charles Dickens's "own and only" manuscript of his classic and beloved story. It contains a facsimile of the original manuscript of A Christmas Carol, published in full-color, with a foreword by Colm Tóibín and introduction by Declan Kiely.